LECTURE 9

ETYMOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE

ENGLISH WORD-STOCK.
 native
In linguistic literature the term is
conventionally used to denote words of Anglo-Saxon origin
brought to the British Isles from the continent in the 5th
century by the Germanic tribes — the Angles, the Saxons
and the Jutes. Practically, however, the term is often applied
to words whose origin cannot be traced to any other
language. Thus, the word path is classified as native just
because its origin has not yet been established with any
degree of certainty.
 The term borrowing is used in
linguistics to denote the process of
adopting words from other languages
and also the result of this process, the
language material itself.
 It is extended onto the so-
called translation-loans
(or loan-translations) and
semantic borrowing.
Translation-loans are words and expressions
formed from the material available in the
language after the patterns characteristic of
the given language, but under the influence
of some foreign words and expressions
(e. g. mother tongue<L. lingua materna; it goes
without saying < Fr. cela va sans dire; wall
newspaper < Russ. стенгазета).
Semantic borrowing is the appearance
of a new meaning due to the influence of a
related word in another language
(e.g. the word propaganda and reaction acquired their
political meanings under the influence of French,
deviation and bureau entered political vocabulary, as
in right and left deviations, Political bureau, under
the influence of Russian).
 There is also certain confusion between the terms source of
borrowings and origin of the word. This confusion may be seen in
contradictory marking of one and the same word as, say, a French
borrowing in one dictionary and Latin borrowing in another. It is
suggested here that the term source of borrowing should be applied
to the language from which this or that particular word was taken
into English. So when describing words as Latin, French or
Scandinavian borrowings we point out their source but not their
origin. The term origin оf the word should be applied to the
language the word may be traced to. Thus, the French borrowing
table is Latin by origin (L. tabula), the Latin borrowing school
came into Latin from the Greek language (Gr. schole), so it may be
described as Greek by origin.
 Words of native origin consist for the most part of
very ancient elements—Indo-European, Germanic
and West Germanic cognates. The bulk of the Old
English word-stock has been preserved, although
some words have passed out of existence. When
speaking about the role of the native element in the
English language linguists usually confine themselves
to the small Anglo-Saxon stock of words, which is
estimated to make 25—30% of the English
vocabulary.
Almost all words of Anglo-Saxon origin belong to very
important semantic groups.
They include
auxiliary and modal verbs (shall, will, must, can, may)
pronouns (I, you, he, my, his, who, etc.),
prepositions (in, out, on, under, etc.),
numerals (one, two, three, four, etc.),
conjunctions (and, but, till, as, etc.)
Notional words of Anglo-Saxon origin include such groups as
words denoting
-parts of the body (head, hand, arm, back, etc.),
-members of the family and closest relatives (farther, mother,
brother, son, wife),
-natural phenomena and planets (snow, rain, wind, sun, moon, star,
etc.),
-animals (horse, cow, sheep, cat),
-qualities and properties (old, young, cold, hot, light, dark, long),
-common actions (do, make, go, come, see, hear, eat, etc.), etc
The great stability and semantic peculiarities of Anglo-
Saxon words account for their great derivational
potential. Most words of native origin make up large
clusters of derived and compound words in the
present-day language,
e.g. the word wood is the basis for the formation of the
following words: wooden, woody, wooded, woodcraft,
woodcutter, woodwork and many others.
The formation of new words is greatly facilitated by the fact
that most Anglo-Saxon words are root-words
 Borrowings enter the language in
two ways: through oral speech (by
immediate contact between the
peoples) and through written speech
(by indirect contact through books,
etc.)
 Oral borrowing took place chiefly in the early
periods of history, whereas in recent times written
borrowing gained importance. Words borrowed orally
(e.g. L. inch, mill, street) are usually short and they
undergo considerable changes in the act of adoption.
Written borrowings (e.g. Fr. communiqué,
belles-lettres, naïveté) preserve their spelling and some
peculiarities of their sound-form, their assimilation is a
long and laborious process.
 Though borrowed words undergo changes in the
adopting language they preserve some of their
former peculiarities for a comparatively long
period. This makes it possible to work out some
criteria for determining whether the word belongs
to the borrowed element
In some cases the pronunciation of the word (strange sounds,
sound combinations, position of stress, etc.), its spelling and
the correlation between sounds and letters are an indication
of the foreign origin of the word.
This is the case with waltz (G.),. psychology (Gr.), soufflé
(Fr.), etc. The initial position of the sounds [v], [dз], [з] or of
the letters x, j, z is a sure sign that the word has been
borrowed, e.g. volcano (It.), vase (Fr.), vaccine (L.), jungle
(Hindi), gesture (L.), giant (OFr.), zeal (L.), zero (Fr.), zinc
(G.), etc.
 The morphological structure of the word and its
grammatical forms may also bear witness to the word
being adopted from another language.
Thus the suffixes in the words neurosis (Gr.) and
violoncello (It.) betray the foreign origin of the words.
The same is true of the irregular plural forms papyra
(from papyrus, Gr.), pastorali (from pastorale, It.),
beaux (from beau, Fr.), bacteria, (from bacterium, L.)
and the like.
 Since the process of assimilation of borrowings
includes changes in sound-form, morphological
structure, grammar characteristics, meaning and
usage Soviet linguists distinguish phonetic,
grammatical and lexical assimilation of
borrowings.
 Phonetic assimilation comprising changes in
sound-form and stress is perhaps the most
conspicuous. Sounds that were alien to the English
language were fitted into its scheme of sounds. For
instance, the long [e] and [ε] in recent French
borrowings, alien to English speech, are rendered with
the help of [ei] (as in the words communiqué, chaussée,
café).
Familiar sounds or sound combinations the position of
which was strange to the English language, were
replaced by other sounds or sound combinations to
make the words conform to the norms of the language,
e.g. German spitz [∫pits] was turned into English
[spits]. Substitution of native sounds for foreign ones
usually takes place in the very act of borrowing. But
some words retain their foreign pronunciation for a
long time before the unfamiliar sounds are replaced by
similar native sounds.
Grammatical Assimilation. Usually as soon as
words from other languages were introduced
into English they lost their former
grammatical categories and paradigms and
acquired hew grammatical categories and
paradigms by analogy with other English
words, as in
Lexical Assimilation. When a word is taken over into another
language, its semantic structure as a rule undergoes great
changes. Polysemantic words are usually adopted only in one
or two of their meanings. Thus the word timbre that had a
number of meanings in French was borrowed into English as
a musical term only. The words cargo and cask, highly
polysemantic in Spanish, were adopted only in one of their
meanings — ‘the goods carried in a ship’, ‘a barrel for
holding liquids’ respectively.
Borrowing also considerably enlarged the English
vocabulary and brought about some changes in
English synonymic groups, in the distribution of
the English vocabulary through spheres of
application and in the lexical divergence between
the variants of the literary language and its
dialects.